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How to Succeed with Your Strategic Plans and Initiatives

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This is a guest post by Peter C. Atherton, P.E.

There’s no question that strategic planning is essential for individual, team, and organizational success. Yet despite this, the vast majority of strategic plans and major strategic initiatives fail or fail to be fully or successfully implemented. 

Why is this the case and, more importantly, what can we do to ensure that we, our teams, and our organizations are on the winning side? 

strategic planning
From my perspective as both a strategic planning participant at manager, principal, and firm owner levels and now as a strategic planning facilitator and execution consultant, here are the top 10 reasons most strategic plans and major strategic initiatives either languish or fail:  

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TCEP 179: Harnessing Teamwork, Communications, and Collaboration (to Make Civil Engineering Projects Successful)

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harnessing teamwork

In this episode, which is part of our Women in Civil Engineering series, I talk to Hannah Albertus-Benham, a Senior Water Resources and Environmental Engineer at Wood, about the challenges of working in a highly scientific project with real impacts on a community, as well as harnessing teamwork, communications, and collaboration to be successful.

Engineering Quotes:

harnessing teamwork

harnessing teamwork

Here Are Some of the Questions I Ask Hannah:

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Manage Your Projects to Meet Your Clients’ Expectations

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This is an article by John M. Lowe, Jr., P.E., speaker for our upcoming Civil Engineering Collective session: Manage Your Projects to Meet Your Clients’ Expectations, which you can find here.

Hardly anything has a greater influence on how we perceive being successful in life than how we meet the expectations of others and how well they meet ours. In our professional life, nowhere else is this more applicable than in the client/consultant relationship.

The official measure of success frequently comes at the end of a project when each party evaluates how well their expectations have been met. The goal, of course, is for both parties to conclude that all of their expectations have been met. This is possible, but only with considerable attention being paid by both parties throughout the entire project. And it can only occur when each party has a clear understanding of what the other party expects. While the responsibility for managing this process is shared by both parties, most of the day-to-day effort usually falls to the consultant.

The first opportunity for the client’s expectations to be established occurs when the consultant submits their Statement of Qualification (SOQ) to the client during the selection process. The consultant wants the client to have a favorable impression of the consultant’s qualifications, but care must be taken to not overstate its qualifications, thereby creating an unattainable expectation of the consultant’s performance. In some cases when this happens, clients become disappointed when its expectations based on the SOQ have not been met. On future projects, they may require that the SOQ be attached and made a part of the contract for professional design services. Then, if the consultant’s performance is not consistent with its SOQ, the client may declare that the consultant is in default.

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Mastering Tough Conversations with your Boss – Engineering Career TV Ep. 11

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Q: How do I have tough conversations with my boss about over commitment?

Welcome to Episode #10 of Engineering Career TV. The topic for this episode is Mastering Tough Conversations with your Boss.

I will spend most of the Engineering Career TV episodes answering questions that have been submitted from engineers around the world on how to rapidly advance their careers and live the lives they want to live.

You can submit questions for the show by clicking here.

Let’s jump into today’s topic, Mastering Tough Conversations with your Boss, which is based on a question from Stan, who asks the following: [Read more…] about Mastering Tough Conversations with your Boss – Engineering Career TV Ep. 11

TCEP 033: Civil Engineering Interviews from the Society of American Military Engineers 2016 JETC

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The Civil Engineering Podcast visits Arizona for the SAME JETC conference…..

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SAME JETC

Episode 33 of The Civil Engineering Podcast was recorded in Phoenix, Arizona, where I interviewed successful individuals at the Society of American Military Engineers (aka SAME) Joint Engineer Training Conference & Expo (JETC).

Here are some of the key points I discussed with ask Adam Hughes during JETC:

  • Adam is a Civil Engineer in the United States Public Health Service that focuses on ensuring that Indian reservations/communities have clean water. He has been practicing in this industry for 12 years now.
  • His team consist out of 14 engineers, drafters, construction inspectors and civil engineering technicians. At the moment they are working with two tribes in southern Arizona.
  • For someone that is interested in management, he recommends to first develop your technical capability and to then develop your verbal and written communication skills. It is also important to find your own management style and gain awareness of your own limitations and preconceptions.
  • We don’t all see a problem the same way and it is not that one way is right and the other way wrong, it is more of trying to understand each other so that we can effectively communicate and work with people.
  • It’s not just about being able to crunch the numbers, you’ve got the take the next step if you want to make change as a civil engineer.

Here are some of the key points I discussed with Kris Prasad at JETC:

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The 7 Key Result Areas for Engineering Career Success

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Engineering Career

You have the skills and ability right now to be ten times more successful in your engineering career. To make this change requires a strategy to focus your efforts and a commitment to incremental improvement.   The strategy will be built on seven domains that you have complete control over.   

Complete control to either improve or do nothing.  

All you have to do is apply the right attitude, employ the right mindset, then get to work.

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Leadership 101- A New Paradigm?

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Slide rule close up with work sheet

This is a guest blog post by Croft Edwards 

Congratulations, you have been such a great engineer that management has decided to make you a leader and give you a team of engineers to lead. Shouldn’t be too difficult to do, after all people are just like engineering problems and in your 4 plus years of engineering school you had many leadership classes. Right! Oh, that’s not the case. You have not had many leadership classes; in fact, in your entire college career of engineering you did not have a single leadership class. What do you do? A great place to start is with a little clarity over what exactly is this thing called leadership and how is it different from management.

We define management as the authority granted to an individual by an organization. The organization you work for gives you authority to do things like hire/fire, manage people and budgets and make decisions in your role as a manager. [Read more…] about Leadership 101- A New Paradigm?

What’s An Ambivert? It’s How To Move Others Throughout Your Engineering Career

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TECC 150907 - AmbivertFor the longest time through my engineering career I labeled myself an ‘introvert’.  You know, the typical engineer stereotype: reserved, shy, maybe a bit nerdy.  OK, maybe seriously nerdy. In any case, I just considered myself the stereotypical engineer introvert.

This was despite the fact that I was leading people, talking in front of groups of peers, and working in project teams.  In each of these situations, I was actively communicating with other people and doing so with a specific intent: to move them.  Move them to do something.  Change a behavior, react to tasks they were assigned, maybe help me accomplish a co-goal.

In reality, I wasn’t just an introvert.  I was bit more than that.  But I wasn’t an extrovert either.  So what was going on? [Read more…] about What’s An Ambivert? It’s How To Move Others Throughout Your Engineering Career

The Power Poses: Blowing Through Anxiety in Your Next Stressful Engagement

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Researchers in psychology are uncovering amazing facts about how our brains are wired. The results benefit more than just the research scientists and psychologists. Even us engineers can benefit from this information and put it to good use in our daily lives. The brain is so impressive that it can help you improve your power poses.

Have you ever felt anxiety before a presentation you were to deliver? How about before a job interview? If you’re like most people, me included, you have. The mind sends threat signals to the brain resulting in the body creating hormones to help us deal with the situation. The two primary hormones involved cortisol (the stress hormone) and testosterone (the dominance hormone).  

The event our mind perceives as a threat increases cortisol levels and lowers testosterone levels. This leaves us with an elevated heart rate, cold palms, sweaty armpits and a feeling of vulnerability and powerlessness. Definitely not what we need heading into a presentation, job interview, or any high-stress social situation. [Read more…] about The Power Poses: Blowing Through Anxiety in Your Next Stressful Engagement